NAB: Adobe Anywhere to Arrive in May

The cloud-based collaborative production service supports users of Premiere, After Effects and Prelude.

Adobe’s cloud-based production service Adobe Anywhere — whose development was first announced at NAB last year — will be demonstrated at the upcoming NAB Show and available beginning next month.

The toolset was created to bring a collaborative workflow to users of Adobe’s Premiere, After Effects and logging tool Prelude, using Adobe’s Mercury streaming engine, a server which will stream relevant frames of video to the user, scaling the quality of playback based on available bandwidth.

It effectively gives the same experience to an editor whether they are working in a suite with local storage or on a MacBook Air streaming images over a local area network (LAN), according to Niels Stevens, Adobe's video business development manager.

“It will allow a post facility of the future to be virtual,” said Stevens. “That is, they can use talent physically located all over the world provided they can connect to the server.”

The first version of Adobe Anywhere will only be for broadcasters or postproduction houses who host private cloud networks, “to ensure quality of service which public cloud doesn't yet guarantee,” he explained. Pricing was not revealed.

Rival Avid launched its cloud platform Sphere last September, building on its shared storage system ISIS, asset management platform Interplay with Media Composer as the front end.

According to Stevens, Adobe Anywhere differs from Avid Sphere because it offers proxy-free working; “All other [competitors] work with low resolution proxies which mean users could be stuck not knowing whether an image is out of sync or in-focus.”

At NAB, Adobe also plans to introduce upgrades to Premiere Pro, including improved color grading with its Lumetri Deep Color Engine; and a new version of After Effects, which is now integrated with Maxon Cinema4D for the creation of 3D graphics.